Mexican Officials Pledge Complete Probe of Bullring Collapse in Tecate

City officials said Monday that the portable bullring that collapsed Sunday, injuring scores of people, had been declared “structurally fit” by state inspectors last week. But witnesses said they saw workmen repairing the stands Saturday.

Mayor Cesar Moreno Martinez de Escobar said Monday that he has ordered an investigation of the ring’s collapse “to determine if anybody is at fault.” Martinez said he does not know how long the investigation will take, but he said that officials from the local district attorney’s office and Baja California Norte Department of Public Works are helping with the probe.

Humberto Noble, an official with the state Department of Public Works in Tecate, said his office inspected the ring last week and again on Saturday, and found it to be safe. Noble said he did not know why the stands collapsed after inspectors had declared them safe.

“The ring’s design complied with all the safety codes,” Noble said. “This ring has been used hundreds of times before without incident. At this point we do not know why it collapsed.”

The mayor said three critical horizontal support bars were removed from a section of the grandstand, causing the oval ring to collapse like a circle of dominoes, and injuring 140 persons. On Sunday, Moreno said, there were reports that a group of youths may have removed the bolts from some of the vertical support beams, causing the stands to collapse. But on Monday, he said he no longer considers that a possibility.

Moreno said that 30 of the injured were taken to Tijuana hospitals and 33 were taken to San Diego area hospitals. He said that only 14 people remained hospitalized in Tecate with “minor injuries” on Monday.

At least 19 U.S. and Mexican citizens remained in hospitals throughout San Diego County Monday, in conditions ranging from serious to good, primarily with head injuries, back problems and broken bones. About the same number were treated in emergency rooms Sunday night and Monday morning. There were no deaths.

Earlier reports said there were 3,000 people in the grandstand when it collapsed. But on Monday, the mayor said the bullring’s capacity is 2,000 and only 1,200 people were in the stands when they collapsed.

“It wasn’t a design flaw. The ring was structurally fit, but with those three metal bars missing, that section (that collapsed) of the grandstand could not support all that weight,” Moreno said.

The ring was inspected on Saturday, after a brawl by more than 100 drunken spectators, and found to be safe, Moreno said. Tecate police fired shots in the air to quell the riot, which took place on the section of the ring that first collapsed Sunday, said Moreno.

Paul Dobson, a San Diego restaurateur and amateur bullfighter who fought in the ring Saturday, said he and his crew had walked through the ring earlier in the day and remarked that one section of it appeared rickety and unsafe.

“We looked at the brackets holding up the stand. We said, ‘Look at those, they’re not even straight,’ ” Dobson said. “They weren’t even perpendicular. Plus, they were working on it, painting it.”

Fire Chief Luis Villavicencio Cordova said he supervised a four-hour inspection of the downed stands Monday morning. Villavicencio said he found numerous metal support bars that were bent and some broken ones. He said he also found 12 horizontal support bars lying on the ground, undamaged. The 12 bars were the same type that Moreno said were missing from the section where the collapse began.

Villavicencio theorized that the 12 bars, which are slipped into place, may have been removed by patrons. There were several concession stands under the ring, and Villavicencio theorized that the patrons may have removed the bars while walking under the ring back to their seats.

“We believe that people returned to their seats by walking under the ring, instead of walking to the stairs that lead to the seats,” Villavicencio said. “The bars that were removed were about knee high, and the people, not wanting to walk all the way around the ring to return to their seats, simply pulled them out and made a path under the seats.

“Without these 12 bars, the grandstand could not support the weight on it, particularly when the spectators swayed back and forth. Without those 12 bars, the weight could not be evenly distributed in the ring, causing the whole thing to collapse.”

The ring is owned by Mexico City promoter Ernesto San Roman. San Roman reportedly leases the portable grandstand to communities holding bullfights and rodeos. Moreno said he does not think San Roman was responsible for the ring’s collapse.

Like Dobson, Adrian Romero, a Mexican-born matador living in San Diego, had doubts about the arena’s construction.

“The building code there is pretty flexible,” said Romero. “The boards looked about an inch and a half. Something like that should be built with a 2 1/2-inch minimum. I think the structure is not up to code.”

Romero, who had been scheduled to fight during the two-day festival at Tecate but was canceled when the bulls he was to have fought were killed in a road accident en route, said he suspected that the people planning the fight had not left enough time to construct the arena, have it inspected and do repairs if they were needed.

Raquel Martinez, the matadora who was preparing to fight when the ring collapsed, said she had seen two other arenas collapse in Mexico in the past six years, one in Santa Clara and one near Xochimilco.